The Journey
by Verpine
Summary: Ike plans to leave a journey by himself to new lands, all because of a "feeling".  As usual, Ike tends to not get what he wants, as Mia tags along.
1. Prologue

The night was dark and a faint light of a flickering candle cast it's shadow across the small room. A large man moved quickly and silently across the room, packing a knapsack full of provisions and a handful of items necessary for a long journey. The candle light reflected the gleam of a small value of gold hidden in a side pocket of the bag. He finished packing and drew a quill, some ink, and a small role of parchment out of the nearby desk and quickly scrolled a few lines of farewell to his friends and family.

He sighed upon completion of the note, and sat back upon his still made bed. His eyes moved to look through the window in his room. Nothing could be seen, for the moon was new and the stars were veiled by the clouds. The best time to leave would be now, before someone in the fort woke.

He sighed again, and gathered up his knapsack. He put the note on the slightly ruffled covers of his bed, and picked up his gleaming sword and strapped it to his back, out of the way of his knapsack so it could be quickly drawn if necessary. Before leaving Ike blew out the candle, and walked quickly out of the Greil mercenaries headquarters, taking care not to wake up any of the sleeping members of his mercenary company.

Once he was outside he started walking through the dark, heading east.

Unbeknownst to him, a pair of bright emerald eyes observed his departure.


	2. Chapter 1

Ike felt he had made excellent time for leaving in the absolute darkness, and dawn was clearly beginning to show itself to the world in front of him. This would be his first dawn alone, his first dawn without Oscar's cooking, sparring with Mia, Rhys' fearful eyes as he watched the morning combat, Mist's admonitions that he had been too hard on Mia, Mia's angry voice that he had been holding off on her, Soren's inventory reports, everything.

He was leaving, for good he didn't know.

All he knew was a feeling of restlessness, a feeling that demanded that he start heading east. He didn't know why, he didn't know for what reason. He just knew that his place was not to remain in Tellius. He didn't know how dangerous it would be, and he was determined not to lead any more of the mercenaries that had become his family, (or in Mist's case, actually were his family) to their deaths in another of Commander Ike's foolish adventures.

So he had waited for the first new moon to cover his departure after he started having his feelings, and now, almost exactly a year after the defeat of the Goddess Ashera; he was leaving the continent.

As he crested a hill on the road, he saw the first gleams of morning sunlight shining into his face and welcomed the sudden warmth.

He decided to take a quick brake and warm up his cold body, so he took off his knapsack and dropped it to the ground so that he could stretch in the sun a little bit.

He began by stretching his arms out, and drew each arm to its fullest extent above his head, and then bent down at the waist to touch his toes.

It was probably a good thing that he did, or his head might have been severed off by the blade that swung through the air where his neck had been only a moment previously.

Ike gasped and rolled forward, drawing out Ragnell as he came back to his feet and swung his blade around as he turned to counter his sudden opponent's quick attack. He didn't have time to pay attention to any of the person's features that were only barely revealed by the dawn light, and only was able to determine that whoever this person was, they were a fair bit shorter than him (not that that was unusually, as Ike topped almost everyone he met), and that they had a much shorter reach than him, but had a ridiculous amount of skill and speed. He had to focus entirely on the shining blade that kept darting for body to keep the fighter from cutting him to ribbons of flesh.

Whoever he was fighting was good, and that was coming from someone who had personally killed an immortal goddess. His blade barely had time to keep up with the ridiculously fast motions of his opponent's sword. There was no way that this was a common bandit or cutter, this person had to be a professional.

Quickly deciding that winning with his life and losing with his honor was overrated, he swung his blade forward, sending a shock wave of magical power from his blessed sword.

'I'll bet he didn't expect that,' he thought confidently as he rushed forward to press his attack, only to find that the person had simply ducked the magical wave, and rushed forward to get under his much longer reach.

'Who is the guy?' he thought violently to himself as he parried another slash. How could they possibly know that Ike's sword was magical? Unless they had been hired by someone specifically to hunt him down! 'Now why would someone do that? I was a rather large part of that whole business with killing our own beloved, more than slightly maniacal goddess that had turned everyone to stone, wasn't I?' he thought.

'Oh no, if they are targeting me, then maybe they are targeting the rest of the Greil mercenaries! I need to find out from this assassin if there are more of them. Drat, that means I have to capture this guy alive,'.

As the assassin's blade circled around for another slice at his chest, Ike grabbed his sword arm just above the blade hilt with his left hand and halted the attack of his opponent's sword. Ike then threw his weight forward and toppled on top of his opponent, driving his their sword into the ground behind their head, and held Ragnell up to his neck.

"Now", he panted, "just who do you think you are?"

"Wait a minute, Boss! Wait a minute, it's just me Mia!" said his opponent in a very quick and frightened voice.

Then he looked at her head and saw Mia's distinctive violet hair and headband, her emerald eyes, and her trademark orange leather jerkin and padded armor.

Then he realized that his head was less than a hands breadth from her quickly panting face, and that their bodies was pressed together in many places that they most certainly should not be.

"Mia!" he shouted as he sat up quickly on her waist, "what was with the attack? Wait. How did you even know I was here in the first place?"

Mia's emerald eyes, which had been bright from combat, suddenly dimmed, and she glanced away from Ike's blue ones, as if to focus on the intricacies of the grass growing next to her head. She bit her lip a little before responding.

"Um... well... um, I kind of, sort of, um, followed you from the fort when I saw you leaving," she said shamefully, and she continued looking at the grass, with an occasional glance at Ike's face; which was growing steadily more mottled by rage by the second.

"You followed me! Mia, I left at night specifically so that neither you nor anyone else would follow me! Why did you follow me? For that matter, how did you see me? he groaned as all of his plan's for departure came crashing down around him. Now he would have to drag Mia back to the base, where everyone would have been incensed by his letter of departure that he had left for all of them. Then of course, they would all keep him from going, and forcibly restrain him if they had to.

"To answer the second question first, it wasn't difficult. You're kind of um, gigantic, you see," she said, allowing a small trace of humor to crawl into her voice to try to ease Ike's mood. "For the first question, well, I don't entirely know. There were a few reason's like sparring. By the way, if you had left me as only the second best sword fighter in Tellius, I would never have forgiven you!" her voice suddenly grew somewhat angry about him leaving her as only the second best, but quickly returned to her normal voice, though somewhat still subdued.

"But honestly, I really don't know why I followed you; I just got a feeling I suppose, that I needed to follow you for some reason. Oh, and I heard you leave when you made the floorboard in front of my room creak a little if you were wondering why I was up in the middle of the night," she said with a sudden grin.

Ike sighed and stood up, holding out a hand for her to pull herself upright. She grasped it and Ike pulled her up again so that she was standing.

"Okay then, that explains why you were following me, but that doesn't explain the sudden slash at my throat!" Ike growled.

"What? You can't say you don't know why I did that! Come on Ike! Dawn! Don't you see it? DAWN! We always have spars at dawn! Well, that and I was starting to get a little bored following you, and I needed something to do. Besides, I was using my training sword, unlike you," she paused taking a minute to glare at Ragnell, which Ike had slung back over his shoulder again. "Besides, I knew that you would dodge," she said primly and immediately started trotting down the path again.

"Hold on a minute! Mia! Where do you think you are going?" Ike yelled after her.

Mia quickly spun around, her hair shimmering in the newborn rays of light from the sun, and answered like she was talking to a particularly slow witted person.

"Where do you think I'm going, Boss? I'm going where you were going, where ever that going to, happened to be going to," she said with her customary smile attached to her face.

"And what makes you think that you can come? Come on Mia, head back to the base, I really need to go alone,"

"Okay, Boss! Whatever you say!" she said as she spun around again and started jogging down the path that she had just started going down.

Ike sighed and ran his hand down his face. 'Oh well,' he thought, 'that part at least was to be expected,' he thought to himself as he looked to the morning's sky. The orange and red colors of the morning sun reflecting off of the numerous clouds were quite stunning, but held no answer for him. Sighing again, he started running after the ridiculous Trueblade that had somehow finagled herself into his journey.

Author's Note I honestly have no idea where I'm going with this story, so seriously, anything can happen at this point. (I might even kill them both MWAHHAHAHA! Probably not though).

If anyone has anything they would like clarified in the story (i.e. the sword fighting scene, setting details, more characterization, et cetera), please feel free to respond to it and say so. You can't possibly be a harsher critic than I can be.

Also, I'm working on so many different things right now, I honestly have no idea when I'll be able to update this and my other story(ies) but rest assured that I will (eventually).  
>And If nobody likes it, then too bad! I'll update it anyway!<p>

Also, also, I know the ending is stupid. If there is anything that I'm even worse at writing than beginnings to papers, its writing the blasted endings. Again, I'm working on it.

Thank you to the first few people who reviewed. I really hate to not take all of the blame for the issues here, but my writing tools on this computer are less than stellar, so I fixed most of the quotation marks and combined words. I should have reviewed it again after I finally was able to actual post it, and for that I apologise.

As for the lines with the name and date thing, your guess is as good as mine to what those are and how they got there. Deleted them though.

Continue to critique!


	3. Chapter 2

[Just to let everyone know, I am going to use measurements from the American system of measurement (i.e. feet, miles, pounds, Fahrenheit, et cetera). I'm sure anyone who uses the metric system (et cetera) already know the conversion factors, or if not, your already on the Internet. Also, when I say degrees, I'm talking about the angle degrees, not the temperature. I'm just trying to limit confusion, because I'm sure most of the people who read this will get those parts fairly intuitively]

Night was creeping back upon the duo as they approached a small hamlet on the outskirts of the Crimean capital Melior. Ike and Mia had travelled nearly 20 miles, and were both extremely tired and ready to rent a room at the nearest inn. Mia just wished that the nearest inn didn't happen to be in the middle of a veritable cesspool of a town.

"Come on Ike! The next town is only another two miles down the road. It can't be half as bad as this, um, erm-" she paused trying to find an adjective that would properly describe the disgusting village.

The village consisted of a grand total of 11 buildings, all on one torn street. Most towns in Crimea had enough combined money to at least pay for some basic cobblestones on the main road. This main road looked more like a swamp than anything else, and it and the single guttering torch outside were really the only indications that there actually was a town in the gathering dark. The small amount of the buildings that they could see weren't any better either. The walls were grimy, the roofs were uneven and unkept. Either of the two travelers would have been fine with the town being poor, if the swampy conditions didn't give them as obvious an indication of potential bed mates in the night.

"errrr-" Mia continued searching her mind for right descriptive word.

"Slovenly, squalid, disgusting, nasty, putrid, dilapidated, insalubrious-"

"Insalubriwhatis?" Mia asked incredulously in answer to Ike's list of adjectives.

"Insalubrious. It means unclean or unhealthy," Mia continued to stare at Ike like he had said that he was the moon and wanted to play in a volcano. In other words, like he wasn't making sense or had gone completely insane. Ike did _not_ know big vocabulary words. Mia was pretty sure that the biggest word he even knew was mercenaries , and he probably only knew that word because it was in the name of of the mercenary group that he commanded.

"Yes, I am still Ike," Ike said patiently with his eyes looking straight up in an expression of irritation, "And don't worry, I only knew that because Soren was talking about Boyd,  
>after he got that weird disease thing,"<p>

Mia let out the breath she had just realized that she had been holding and grinned back up at Ike as she remembered Boyd's skin changing color to match his hair, and the weird ooze that had come out of his nose. It hadn't been anything serious for his health, just funny to look at.

"Well, good, I was a little worried for a minute," she said.

"What did you decide?" Ike asked, getting back to the previous part of the conversation where Mia had been searching for her particular adjective to describe the ramshackle town they were currently trying not to stand in. Which, considering its diminutive size, wasn't very difficult.

"What was I deciding?" Mia asked blankly. Ike sighed. Mia always was a bit of ascatterbrain, except when it came to fighting, dueling, and anything related to fighting or dueling. She brought a focus to those topics unseen in the rest of the world.

"Your word for describing the town. I gave you a few suggestions,"

"Oh yeah! Um, well I liked dilapidated, it sort of gives the right feel for the buildings, you know?" she said glancing around at the now officially titled, dilapidated buildings.

Ike nodded and started walking toward the the dirty inn.

"Hey! Ike! The whole point of this conversation was to point out how disgusting this town is so that we can go to the hopefully much cleaner, next town," Mia called after him. He didn't stop, and continued walking to the inn, where he opened the door. Even for supremely over-muscled Ike, the rusty hinges of the door proved difficult to open. He still opened the door without too much of an issue, and then entered the poorly lit room, leaving the door open for one grumbling trueblade to follow him into the dismal tavern.

Mia poked her head in after Ike and glanced around the room. The first thing she noticed was the lack of a proper floor. Instead of stone or floorboards, all there was to cover the dirt was a few thrush branches spread haphazardly throughout the room. There were also some poorly made tables sunk into the muddy floor. In fact, they would have been useless as tables, except that the chairs had sunk into the slop covering the floor just as deep the tables themselves. The room was poorly lit by a single dying fire in a shoddy fireplace that looked like it had been made out of the mud that covered the entire town. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the room, including Ike and a man that was talking to who she supposed had to be the barman, because he was behind an inset little space underneath some old stairs that led to the rooms upstairs and had a bar in front of him. Literally, a single board of wood that bared the entrance to his little corner. She walked over to Ike and the barman who was wiping a dirty mug with an even dirtier cloth while he talked to Ike.

"So what is the price for a room?" Ike was asking the barman. The barman shrugged and started speaking in a supremely bored and uneducated voice.

"I duhno, fitty, sitty, sumtin like dhat," which translated as far as Mia could tell, to something similar to, "the price of renting one of the rooms at this establishment is 60 gold". Or something like that anyway.

Then his eyes moved to look at Mia and widened slightly. Seeing a pretty girl approaching him, he next addressed Mia in an obvious attempt to start talking her up.

"Well, hallo miss beautiful lady, what cen I be a gettin ' a you this evenin'?" his grinning eyes drifted obviously down to goggle at her chest. Mia took a deep mental breathe to keep from using her sword that was hidden behind her bright red cape to crush his brains against the nearest barstool. Or even just her fist. That might even be more fun.

"Actually _sir_,I'm with him," she said pointing to Ike. The man glanced away from her chest and looked at Ike, who was standing there passively, with arms that appeared to be as big as his own legs, and a very large sword strapped to his back. He decided there was valor in not going in that particular direction, and turned back to Ike to tell him somewhat more intelligibly that the price was 60 pieces of gold for a night's stay. Ike thanked the man bluntly and tossed the bits of gold to barman, who caught them and began to count them.

"Room 4," he muttered gruffly, looking closely at one of the gold pieces as if to check its authenticity.

"Hey Mia, see if you can get us something to eat for dinner, I'll take your bag upstairs," Ike said. Mia tossed her small bag to Ike who caught it and started walking up the protesting stairs.

Mia looked around the room to see if there was any food anywhere, and since there didn't appear to be any, she turned back around to look at the barman, who had been looking at her butt this time.

"Do you have anything for dinner?" she asked, trying to be polite but letting some of her anger show through to get the message to the idiot before her that she was not interested. She absolutely hated it when men started looking at her like that. It was the one thing guaranteed to get her out of her generally cheery manner, and was not something she tolerated. The barman looked back at her face, and grunted and pulled a bag out from one of the crates behind him and handed it to Mia. Mia opened the bag and saw that it was full of raw potatoes. She looked back up at him incredulously, and he shrugged.

"15 gold fer da sack, 40 fer cooked 'taters," he grunted again and went back to wiping his filthy mug. She set the sack of potatoes back on the board that served as a board,  
>and turned around to walk up the stairs after Ike. 'I'll just have to settle for some of that hardtack that I packed I suppose,' she thought to herself. Suddenly, a hand came out of nowhere and grabbed her arm and wrenched her back around. She found herself staring at a big, fat, man along with two friends, one fatter, the other bigger. She also noticed that all of their eyes were unfocused. 'Oh joy,' she thought, 'drunk idiots who think they are getting lucky. Geez, does this town have girls?'<p>

"Hey, beautiful, wanna come over with us? You don't need to hang around that blue haired chump, come over with us, will make you happy," he leaned forward as he said that last bit, and tried to whisper it in her ear. She caught a massive whiff of alcohol rolling off his breath like a fog on the sea. She hated alcohol, even the smell of it could drive her off the wall. The other thing guaranteed to get her off her happy mood. She was starting to get really mad at these filthy idiots. 'Okay Mia,' she thought, 'calm down; they're drunk, they probably don't get many girls staying in the area, try to let them down nicely, maybe I won't have to smash their balls their skulls.'

"No thanks, I was just heading up to see my friend," she said, trying to make her voice sound as bright and cheery as it usually was when she wasn't around ogling and drunk men. She tried to pull out of his grasp, but realized that he had an iron grip on her arm, and wasn't letting her go. In fact, his face was starting to get even redder than the alcohol could account for.

"I don't think so," he slurred angrily, "I think you are gonna come wid us, and you are gonna open them pretty little legs for me and my friends," he said as a grin came over his red mottled face. He pulled her close to him so that she was pressed up against his filthy body. She glanced quickly around the room to see that the four of them were the only ones in the room, as the barman and the few other people in the room had apparently departed as soon as the big, fat man had started sauntering over to her with his big and ugly cohorts. Realizing that she was on her own, she started feeling happy again. Happy that she was going to be able to pulverize them without any bearing on her conscience.

Mia was at the point in her career where she was almost unstoppable in combat. For that matter, the only person in Tellius that could realistically beat her was unloading their supplies upstairs. She was also, unquestionably, the fastest fighter in the known world, and turned upon that speed to get her out of her present, disgusting situation. She made her body go limp, and slipped out from the man's sweaty grip. She then spun her legs clockwise at the big man that had been holding her arm, and knocked his legs out from under him. As he fell forward over her, she rolled forward underneath where his legs had been, and came to her feet facing away from the first man's two big and fat respectively friends. As she came to her feet she drew her blade, the Vague Katti, out from its scabbard.

The Vague Katti was an immensely powerful blade, as it was an expertly crafted swordin its on right, and it had also been blessed by the goddess of chaos, Yune, which made it indestructible, and capable of cutting through any armor imaginable. Stefan, the branded sword master of the Grann desert in Begnion, had given it to her after the defeat of the goddess of order, Ashera.

It would more than suffice to beat these three unarmored, belligerent, drunks.

She spun around, and swung the sword in an unbelievably fast pattern that reflected the firelight and ended the movement holding the sword at precisely 30 degrees. To anyone who wasn't drunk or stupid, this would have signified that they were facing a master swords women, and that they had no chance at all.

However, both of the men who were still standing were both stupid, and drunk, and charged the purple haired girl.

Mia grinned at the 'challenge' and set about whacking both of the men with the flat of her blade, until they had been knocked unconscious by repeated blows to the head from the flat, but still hard metal of Mia's blade.

A brief show of combat that had lasted less then 10 seconds.

Mia then walked over to the first man, and kicked him over so that he was laying flat on his back. He started to get up, only to find the very tip of her sword lodged in the fat under his chin, and it was not moving. At all. He looked up at the trueblade that was standing above him, and even drunken, realized that he could die right then, and all she would have to do would be to realize her hold on the blade that was right above his jugular vein, and it would slide right though his neck just as easily as it could cut through melted butter. Mia grinned sadistically at him.

"Well, what have we learned here today? I'll start. Don't mess with Mia, get sober, never drink again, when you try to hit on a girl, you stop when she says no, and you definitely do not try to gang rape her afterward. Did I miss anything?" she said like he was simply a student that had not been paying attention in class. Her actions demonstrated otherwise, as she let the blade slide forward enough to cause blood to start spilling out of a small puncture wound under his chin.

"Uh, uh, no ma'am, that's, uh, everything, ma'am, and I will never do any of that ever again," he gulped as the blade didn't move for a moment after he said that. Was she going to kill him?

Suddenly, the blade moved away from his neck and the blood was flicked off of it to go sailing through the air to land on the unconscious back of one of his friends.

"Wonderful, now, I want you to leave, and if I ever see you again, and you are doinganything I disagree with, I will kill you. Do you understand?" she said sweetly to him,  
>but the hard glint of fire in her eyes, gave away her true emotions. He nodded very quickly, and she smiled at him again and said, "Good! Then you can drag your little friends out of here, and tell them the same thing when they wake up from their little nap, he nodded again, and Mia let him get up. He then grabbed the collars of his two friends and quickly dragged them out of the mud in the inn to the mud that was the the street outside.<p>

Mia started humming to herself as she wiped the tip of her blade off with the dirty cloth that the barman had left on the bar, and re-sheathed the blade in it's scabbard. She always enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a fight, even a fight against a bunch of sexist, (attempted) rapist, drunks. She climbed up the stairs above the bar, and walked down to room four. Or at least she assumed it was room 4, because there was no number on the door, but the one before it on the same side of the hallway had at least had a 2 written directly onto the door. She knocked on the door and heard Ike mutter some sort of curse as she heard a loud thud. She opened the door to see him holding his foot and hopping around the room muttering more curses to himself. She also saw that he had dropped her now bag on the floor and quickly put two and two together.

"Boss! Were you going through my stuff!" she yelled at him. He stopped hopping and tentatively set his foot back on the ground and tested putting his weight on it. He then looked back at her like he had his hand in the cookie jar, and she had just caught him.

And in a sense she had.

"Um, well, um, er, you see, um, that was, um, um, how was your day?" he said with a big fake grin on his face as he looked at her. She lowered her face at him, and looked angrily at him through her eyelashes, crossing her arms and tapping her foot as she did so. Ike looked around for an escape route, only to realize that Mia was still standing in the doorway, emerald eyes blazing.

"BOSS! WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN MY BAG!" she shouted at him.

"Um, well, I was, uh, oh fine, I was hungry, and I saw that you had a loaf of bread in there, and well, um-" his face had become a solid red of embarrassment, but she quickly lost her anger, and let out a quick laugh.

"That's what you were doing in my bag? Oh. Well, Boss, that really isn't too bad, I was going to give you some of that anyway, because, well, I had an experience downstairs," she then proceeded to briefly tell him the story of why they had no dinner, and why they would probably be getting an extra bill for having a bar fight.

"I thought I heard a bunch of loud noises coming from downstairs," he said when she had finished. During the story, he had moved to sit on one of the two beds in the small room, and he now looked up at her as she finished.

"Well, yeah, I wasn't really focusing on keeping things quiet you know, and I didn't really want to get raped. That, and I was getting mad. I'm glad I didn't kill them though," she said. With that, she left the door frame that she had been leaning on and walked over to the bed that wasn't currently occupied by Ike, and collapsed on it, tired from the long walk and the bar fight, w which, while brief, still caused a huge spike in her adrenaline. She crawled to the top of the bed and shoved her limp body underneath the covers, only to find that, while unoccupied by Ike, the bed itself was still occupied, as a grey and black mottled cat leaped out of it and started hissing at her.

Mia shrieked in surprise and fell off the bed, and quickly crawled backwards towards the other bed, where Ike had jumped back up to see what had scared Mia, only to seethe hissing and spitting cat crouched on the now ruffled covers of the other bed.

"Shut up! It jumped me!" Mia said as Ike fell back onto his bed howling with laughter.

"Well, at least it got you to laugh, that doesn't happen very often," she grumbled as she stood back up and slowly approached the bed with the cat perched on top of it. Then she dove forward grabbed the cat, and tossed out of the conveniently still open door, running after it to close the door behind it. She moaned as she slid down the door to glare at the still laughing Ike.

Boss! Stop laughing before I do the same to you as I did the cat! she growled menacingly at her commander. Ike muffled his mouth with one hand and held the other up in a gesture of peace as she stood up and started approaching him. She grumbled again and walked over to her bed, blowing the candle that lit the room out as she went. After taking her scabbard, cape, and leather armor off, she checked the bed for any more unwelcome guests, and seeing none crawled into it. For being a disgusting place, the inn had somehow managed to keep the sheets relatively clean, and the bed didn't have any bugs or rodents any it (probably thanks to that vicious cat). She settled into the feather pillow and fell asleep within a few moments.

Author's Note; I would like to point out that everything in this chapter came entirely off of the the top of my head, except for the nasty inn, and the basic outline for the bar fight, so if any of it doesn't make sense, put it in a review, and tell me so, so that I can fix it. Also, sometimes my brain gets farther ahead of my fingers, so sometimes words can get jumbled up. I tried to avoid that as much as possible, but sometimes it still happens.

Thanks for reading if you are reading.

Another note; I am not sure where I am going with this, and I rated it M, primarily because I don't know where I'm going with it. It might get really heavily romantic, or it might only have hints of that sort of thing (by romantic I mean sex and making out in general, because I know about as much about romance as I do about Quantum theory (as in none, 0, the derivative of a constant, et cetera)) If any of the interactions seem weird, odd, stupid, boring, unrealistic, whatever, bear in mind that I really don't always know what I'm talking about, and have to go off of movies, watching other people talk, and guessing. It can't all be wrong, but I highly doubt all of it is right. Rambling, ignore me please.

I published this story about 20 minutes ago now, and as soon as I pressed the button, I realized that I had once again forgot to go over it for the crushed words and the lack of quotation marks that is the result of the nonsensical way I have to deal with to even get stories on here, so if anyone has read it since I posted it, I'm very sorry about that (again), and I hope I got most of the issues from that.


	4. Chapter 3

"Hey Boss, do you know what I think?" Mia asked. Ike grunted in response. "I think you got us lost again," Mia said, telling him anyway. He merely grunted again.

They had left the dilapidated village and the would-be rapists behind over a week ago, and had started marching toward Daein to begin their search for new lands to the far east. After a few days of walking, they had bought some horses at a town (a much nicer town than the last) along the way, speeding their journey considerably. They had been heading straight for Oribes bridge on the border of Crimea and Daein, and should have arrived sometime at night the day before.

"Hey Boss, you know if you don't answer me, I'm going to have to start leading the way," Mia said to him with a grin. Mia's lack of a sense of direction was near legendary among the mercenaries, and had been the point of many jokes about Mia. With her usually being the originator of the jokes.

Ike's eyes widened momentarily into alarm, but he quickly returned to his face to his normal scowl, and continued staring off into the middle distance ahead of him. He had to keep control of the situation somehow, and sitting impassively and hoping that Mia would just happen to select the right trail to get them out of the forest. Mia shrugged, and with the same motion, jabbed the heels of her boots lightly into the flanks of her horse, which started moving forward at a trot. She quickly moved past the stoic commander and his equally stoic horse, and started riding down the path ahead of them at a quick trot, ducking the occasional branch from the trees around them.

Out of sight of Mia's quick eyes, Ike took a deep breathe and pressed his fingers to the pressure points on his temple. She had been saying, in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, that they had been going in the wrong direction for the past three hours, and it had been giving him a headache of epic proportions. Why couldn't the ebullient Trueblade just be quiet? For five minutes!

Oh well, he thought to himself, at least she's better than Bastian. The long, sanctimonious speeches of the half mad noble had a penchant for driving him either completely insane, or to contemplate particularly gruesome methods of murder. He liked Bastian, but just wished that he wouldn't prattle on and on about farcical things, like flowers and sunsets, and then comparing them to other things; usually Lucia. It was ridiculous for him to use such an extensive vocabulary on everything, and it seemed pretty obvious that the vain count was simply trying to embellish his own learning and intelligence.

Suddenly, Ike heard a thrumming sound, followed by a shriek from up ahead.

Ike returned from his thoughts quickly, and looked ahead to see that Mia had been knocked off her mare, which was prancing about on its rear legs, lashing its hooves out at Mia's attacker. The man was dressed as a bandit, and had an axe. He was bleeding from a gash on his face from where one of the horse's hooves had gone home. The man shouted to some nearby bushes, and another dozen similarly dressed and armed men rushed out toward's the unmoving Trueblade. Ike looked quickly at Mia to see that she had been hit by an arrow that appeared to have caught her high in the shoulder.

Ike cursed and drove his heels hard into the sides of his mount, and went careening down the trail with his head lowered over the horse's bucking head. He drew out Ragnell as he went holding it perpendicular to the horse's line of motion, being unfamiliar with combat from horseback. It would do Mia no good for him to chop his own horse's head of out of ignorance.

One of the men looked up to see Ike charging down the path, and yelled to the others, forming them up into a ragged line to face off against Ike's charge. Ike, not wanting to fight so many men from horseback, rose in the stirrups, and leaped off of the horse, slashing his sword in front of him as he jumped. The resultant magical shockwave bowled over three of the men nearest to him, and sent them flying into the nearby trees. One shakily stood up, leaning against a tree as he did so, while the other two had both broken their necks on trees, and never moved again. Ike rolled to his feet after his jump, and sent another shockwave, this time vertical, at one of the men who had been charging at him with his axe raised and a scream leaping from his throat.

The next blast of magic severed his head from his body, and his throat gurgled for a moment before the rest of the corpse toppled forward.

The rest of the bandits were right behind him, and slowed to see the mercenary commander send an immensely powerful shockwave from his sword of all things. They were very unused to their prey employing any weapons, let alone expensive magical swords. Their fear cost them another two lives, as Ike sent more blasts from Ragnell at them.

Howling in rage the remaining eight bandits charged Ike with their axes raised.

Ike realized, as he sent off the magical blasts from his sword, how much he had missed real battle, and slaughtering these bandits had provided him with a wonderful opportunity. However, he also knew that eight bandits, inept as they might be, could still be an issue to take on all at the same time, and decided to try to scare them off with more magical blasts. Unfortunately, that appeared to have only enraged them, and they all charged at him with blood in their eyes.

Ike parried the first axe, and spun his blade around the handle of the axe, effectively disarming the bandit wielding it. He then swung his blade around with a grunt, and decapitated the next bandit, and as the blood spurted out of the artery in his neck, he lashed out with his right leg at one he had disarmed, tripping him to the ground. Ike then swung his blade down on the next bandit, who had been trying to split his skull in half with his axe, and felt his sword dig into the man's ribs. Quickly pulling the blade out as the man started to scream and fall forward, Ike swung his sword around again, and caught two more axes on the blade. He pushed them back with sheer power, knocking them into the bandit that Ike assumed was their leader, and they all fell into a heap of tangled limbs and weaponry.

It was at that point that the archer that had shot Mia fired again at Ike.

Ike, led by a combination of sheer luck, and that strange sixth sense that would often warn him of danger, happened to roll forward to duck an axe that had been hurtling toward his midriff, and the arrow struck the shrieking bandit in the back of the mouth.

Ike spun around as he got out of his rolling position, and held Ragnell before him, deflecting several attacks from the remaining bandits with the edge of the blade.

The bandits, fortunately for Ike, lacked any sense of battlefield coordination, as they wouldn't take any risks to go around to surround the Vanguard, or even to charge him all at once to bury his sword under their many swinging axes. This lack of combat experience caused the remaining three of them that were still standing to be cut down to the ground.

That left six more bandits; the man that Ike had disemboweled who was rolling on the ground in agony, trying to keep his guts from pouring out the massive slash in his side;  
>the man that had been blasted into the tree line, and was even now struggling to stand up under his own power, the two men who had been bowled over the leader, when Ike shoved them back; the leader himself, having disengaged with the two remaining unhurt men, was now fighting Ike with them; and the archer that had now stood up from the bushes and was waiting for the maelstrom of weaponry to allow him a shot at Ike.<p>

Ike continued to parry the remaining bandits weapons, and wondered vaguely in the back of his mind, why they hadn't run off as soon as he proved his viciously effective fighting capabilities to them, but then shrugged it off and continued his ridiculously uneven fight with the the remaining three bandits, and their archer that had another arrow trained directly on him.

The movement of the fight allowed Ike to see where their horses were. His horse, clearly a stoic of epic proportions had nonchalantly wandered over to a nearby clearing, and was chomping at the grass.

Mia's horse however, had stayed closer to the combat. The animal had stopped prancing after the bandits had left her master alone, and was now looking ferociously at the bandits as she guarded her fallen master. Who Ike realized was not laying on the ground anymore. In fact, all that remained of Mia was a small bloodstain in the dirt from her arrow wound.

Ike drew back a little from his opponents and absently parried every blow that was aimed for him to glance around the nearby trees to see if she had dragged herself to one of them, but didn't see her anywhere. Starting to feel a little frightened, he began to press the three remaining bandits harder, pushing them towards the archer. He had refrained from killing them so far, because they were his only shield from another arrow. He had been trying to drag the fight closer to the archer's position so that he could finish him off first, but now saw that he didn't have the luxury. Mia could have been kidnapped in her weakened state, and would need to be rescued.

Swinging his sword up into the air, Ike brought it down on the leaders head so hard that blade split the bandit in half, right down the middle. As the mans organs and blood gushed out of him to slop on the ground, Ike slashed out to either side, cutting deep into the sides of the other bandits, and before the archer could even think about loosing his next shaft, Ike sent another magical shockwave at him, blasting him into the survivor of Ike's first magical blast, and toppling both of them to the ground.

Knowing who these people were, and not having the time to bring them to the nearest Crimean town or military outpost, he quickly cut the throats of both of remaining bandits on the ground with his knife. He then ran quickly over to his horse, and after attaching the reins of Mia's mare to the saddle of his horse, he leaped into the saddle to begin pursuing Mia's kidnappers.

It was at this point, that he realized that he had no idea where the kidnappers may have taken her.

Growling to himself, he swung back out of the saddle, and began casting around where Mia's body had lain for signs of her kidnappers. Ike had never been much of a tracker,  
>and the need for it had come up very rarely among the mercenaries. Using what skills he had, he looked nearby the bloodstain on the ground and noticed that it appeared to have been smeared a little bit, as though someone had picked the unconscious girl upand started dragging her away before picking her up. The smear appeared to be pointing to the south east, and so Ike, with a grim scowl on his face hoisted himself back onto the saddle of his horse, grabbed the reins, and jabbed his heels into the horse's flanks, following what he sincerely hoped was Mia's trail.<p>

As usual, I do not know where I am going from here, and almost anything can happen (they won't die though, at least, not this early in the story). Again, criticism is welcome.  
>Any criticism, good bad, "go through yourself off the nearest cliff" (for all the good that would do, the nearest cliff is about three feet tall, as such, not very effective).<p>

If anyone has any prompt ideas for upcoming chapters, put those in a review too. I won't guarantee that they will be used, but they might give me some more ideas.

Also, to anyone who noticed it, I did make a simile about a simile. I didn't even notice until I had read it, and then I just shrugged and decided to keep it in.


	5. Halt in progress

I am REALLY sorry about the lack of updates since... forever. I have simply not been in a Fire Emblem mood. Combine that with college starting up, a LOT of computer issues (I only just got Word to work two weeks ago), and the fact that I have spent 32 Nights of the summer camping have basiacally stopped all production on these stories. I am putting this information on both of the Fire Emblem stories that I have going as a sort of official signal of hiatus for both stories. I will get back to them as soon as I start feeling like Fire Emblem again. I have just been in a Fallout mood lately, and have actually started a story for that. I greatly appreciate the handful of reviews that both of my stories have recieved, and I WILL be getting back to them. I will probably get back to work on them within a few weeks or so, whenever I start playing Radiant Dawn again, but for the moment, both the Outer Lands and the Journey are on hiatus. They are NOT discontinued.

I also apoligize to anyone who sees the update and thinks it is an actual update, it is not unfortunately.


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